A version of this appeared in Word on Fire's Evangelism and Culture Journal No. 19 on Artificial Intelligence, available here.
I have a confession to make: I'm not afraid of artificial intelligence. But maybe I should be.
With artificial intelligence – AI – humans have given machines the ability to not only do what they are programmed to do, but learn working in more efficient ways, increase Programming them with new abilities and strategies that humans cannot predict—and control.
That is, Prima facie, something to fear. But as a man born in 1969, I've lived a lifetime in existential dread of forces I can neither understand nor control – and that's getting a little old.
I have personally joined my fellow Americans in: fear of global famine, fear of a new ice age, fear of Japanese economic dominance, fear of Chinese economic dominance, fear of economic collapse, and fear of terrorists. The world finds new things to fear, but I think there is nothing new under my sun.
I hear concerns about political extremism, but I remember watching Patty Hearst on the evening news. My kids have seen UAPs with their own eyes on YouTube. But I once saw UFOs with my own eyes in a daily newspaper. Critics raise the credible threat of AI disasters—but I survived the credible threat of a Y2K catastrophe.
All these concerns were not unfounded. Some of them were 100% wrong. And our fear actually helped us put up our guard rails and move on. That's how it's always been with technology.
Every technology has its intended benefits and unintended harms, but the Church responds to them all in the same way: we embrace them. Thus, the first run of the printing press was the Gutenberg Bible, the Catholic Vulgate. But then, when Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on a church door the old fashioned way, the printing press made it the first post to go “viral.”
Guglielmo Marconi radioed Pius XI in 1931, broadcasting what may have been the technical mission statement of the Church: “With the help of God, who has placed so many mysterious forces of nature at man's disposal, I The device that would give the faithful the joy of hearing the voice of the Holy Father for the next 100 years. Again and again it used to give pleasure.
I'm a man of the church, so I embrace technologies, and refuse to join the fearful in their bunkers. The way I see it, it's a case of “fool me once, shame on you.” From every dystopian movie for decades, every election since Reagan, every recession since Carter, and a lifetime of modernism. Fool me with nameless fears, then, well, shame should be. I“
That guy has been crying wolf all his life and I'm sick of his voice.
But then I remember something deeply troubling: What makes “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” such a great story isn't that the boy was repeatedly wrong. This is the last time he spoke, he was correct
So is he right this time?
The Guerrilla Problem
What do we fear about AI? I think we fear what the chess piece would fear, if it could.
I The era of AI, Henry Kissinger and his co-authors describe how AlphaZero beat Stockfish at chess in 2017. Stockfish is the opposite of an old-school computerized chess game: programmers put the best of human chess strategy into a machine that can memorize the best moves ever in an instant. . Alpha Zero, developed by Google's Deep Think, was told nothing about human strategy. He was given only the rules and object of the game.
After only four hours of training by playing games against themselves, AlphaZero defeated Stockfish 155 games to 6, with 1 draw. But it was so How It won which was cool. Alpha Zero sacrificed his most valuable pieces – including his queen – to attack his enemy with an efficiency far colder than any human mind could imagine.
“Chess has been shaken to its roots,” said Grandmaster Garry Kasparov after the game. Kissinger and his team fear that “security and world order” will soon be “shaken to its foundations.” AI's unique capabilities will mean that “the delegation of critical decisions to machines may become inevitable.” And if it does, what valuable knights and queens will the AI sacrifice for its own ends?
AI entrepreneur Mustafa Suleiman in his book incoming tide, There are fears that his own companies, DeepMind and Inflection AI, may be part of the unintended rise of a new kind of superpower.
He envisions a future where “anyone with graduate-level training in biology or the enthusiasm for self-directed online learning” can acquire a DNA synthesizer and “transmit far more than anything found in nature.” And can produce deadly novelties.” Other bad actors may go beyond “garage tinkerers” who weaponize AI technologies in ways we literally cannot imagine.
They say a tsunami of AI applications will wipe our preconceptions — and our safety and security — off the map. Indeed, “garage tinkerers” and bad actors may be better equipped to achieve AI breakthroughs than bureaucracies navigating due diligence and legal hurdles. Solomon fears a massive transfer of power, a rapid “hyperevolution” of AI capabilities, an endless acceleration of AI applications toward “omni-use” and asks, when all is said and done, what else? Goes, “Will humans be caught up in it?”
“For all of history, technology has been 'just' a tool,” Solomon said. “But what if this tool came to life?” The powerful animal has been kept in zoos, so AI “could mean humanity is no longer at the top of the food chain.”
Descent into Egypt
I asked Dr. Charles Sprouse at the School of Engineering at Benedictine College in Kansas, where I work, about AI fears. He gave me a remarkable list that proves that fear, like politics, is global. And local is both.
Yes, we fear AI weapons, drones and robots that hunt and kill with superhuman strength and ability. But we also fear autonomous vehicles: What decisions will they make — and what glitches will change those decisions?
We also fear “fake news” on steroids, as smart programmers with questionable agendas mislead the public with deeply politically charged fake news. But we should also be afraid of fake communication: Once I start using metaverse capabilities to chat with my wife in virtual reality, how can I be sure that it's really my wife I'm talking to? have been
We fear government surveillance by machines that can recognize our faces, our bodies, and our movements, and monitor what we're doing in our backyard. But we should also fear corporate AI that knows what we like to eat, and in what quantities; where we hang out, and how often; And what we think when we're online.
Many of us fear technology taking our jobs: Writers, legal professionals and academics fear ChatGPT — but software designers, drug researchers and lab technicians have equally powerful tools for fear.
All of these seem (at first) to be brand new fears, different from the old ones. But are they?
So we fear AI the Monster or AI Master — a Terminator that doesn't, and can't, care about what gets in its way, or a Matrix that enslaves us for its own purposes. AI can take away our autonomy, our freedom, our chosen livelihoods, and our privacy — or it can wipe out civilization as we know it.
But is this really a new kind of fear?
Indeed, AI feels like a descent from the slave masters of Egypt, in the days when “a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, 'Look! The children of Israel are more numerous than we are.' and are mighty. Come, let us deal with them wisely” (Exodus 1:8-10) And while we fear the robot drones, if you remember your old covenant, even in these days Tribes were wiped off the map with impunity.
It would be the height of irony if all our intelligence, divorced from God, did nothing but construct a new and greater slave-master: an artificial pharaoh in the elaborate exercise of building the monuments of Maimonides' pyramids. is adding, to a project we can imagine because its scope is too great for a human mind.
But maybe that's not the real fear.
The real monster is loneliness.
Let me start by saying that I am not afraid of artificial intelligence and I really am not. Not the way I described it, anyway. One thing I've learned in the new technology life is that we always fear the wrong thing.
Maybe what we should really fear is what Sigmund Freud described. Civilization and its Discontents. He wrote:
“If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town, and I would not have needed a telephone to hear his voice. If the introduction of travel across the ocean by ship Had it not been done, my friend would not have embarked on his voyage, and I would not have needed the cable to relieve my anxiety about it.
We feared the dire consequences of each of these technologies—everything but the worse consequences each brought us: isolation.
And that's what we should fear most from AI: a world where we're cut off from what makes us human. one another.
Photo: Bua Noi, B20180